will permit participation in a national fantasy ("National Brands/ National Body: Imitation of Life," 113).
xiii. Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the End of the Mechanical Age, 17, cited in Foster, 139. If I am right to see in online interpellation a generalization of passing and if I am right that this generalization foregrounds the (at once constraining and enabling) role of the lived body as what gives existential meaning to representational modes of agency, then Stone's notion of multiple agency warranted to the physical body must be revised. Specifically, we must reject Stone's discursivizing of the virtual citizen:
By means of warranting, [a] discursive entity is tied to an association with a particular physical body, and the two together ... constitute the socially apprehensible citizen.... Because so much of such an identity is discursive and is produced through the actions of texts, I have elsewhere referred to it as legible body, that is, as textually mediated physicality. The legible body is the social, rather than the physical, body; the legible body displays the social meaning of "body" on its surface, presenting a set of cultural codes that organize the ways the body is apprehended and that determine the range of socially appropriate responses. (Stone, 41, last emphasis added)
As I see it, this discursive conception of warranting forms the Achilles' heel of Stone's analysis. When she celebrates online multiplicity as a form of subjectivity that is liberating because it transcends the lived body, Stone displays a kind of euphoric Cartesianism, all too common in postmodern thinking, which views the body as the first prosthesis. Despite her efforts to retain the category of the physical body, it is all but impossible to fathom what role it could possibly have in underwriting the “transgendered body" that seems rather to be produced by the technological structure of the Internet. Indeed, Stone is unequivocal in proposing the naturalization of the transgendered body in cyberspace as an outright replacement for the physical body.
xiv. For this reason, cyberspace can plausibly be said to take up the legacy of "nonexpressive, nonhumanist modes of performing and producing ‘blackness' and ‘whiteness"" in African-American culture (Foster, 141).
xv. At the very least, this calls on us to take stock of the body's crucial role as the mediator of speech acts and other symbolic gestures in the process of interpellation. As Portuguese philosopher José Gil has brilliantly demonstrated, "symbolic efficiency" derives from the activity of the body as a translator between codes, the operator of what he calls the "infralanguage." It depends on the articulation of the force of language with the affective energy of the body: "For the [magical action of words] to have effects [on the body], words must release forces in the body; these forces must react directly on organs, on their physiology, and the body has to offer itself as a receptive surface of forces" (Gil, 143). In this respect, Gil's work forms a crucial corrective to the performative idealism of Butler and Stone: because the body comprises the site where discursive force is constituted, it simply cannot be reduced to a product or materialization of discursive performance and it cannot be abstracted away as a mere prosthesis.
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